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Essential Britten

Essential Britten PDF Author: John Bridcut
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571290744
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
John Bridcut, author of the acclaimed 'Britten's Children', has included significant fresh material which will make the book indispensable for Britten aficionados as well as for those who are discovering the composer's music for the first time. This guide is all about finding a way into Britten's music. An outline of planned chapters: - The Top Ten Britten pieces - Critics' First Impressions - Britten's Life - Britten and Pears - The things they said - The Music (stage works, choral works, songs, chamber music, orchestral works) - The Interpreters of Britten's work - Britten as Performer - The Impresario (English Opera Group and Aldeburgh Festival) - Britten's Homes - Trivial Pursuits

Essential Britten

Essential Britten PDF Author: John Bridcut
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571290744
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
John Bridcut, author of the acclaimed 'Britten's Children', has included significant fresh material which will make the book indispensable for Britten aficionados as well as for those who are discovering the composer's music for the first time. This guide is all about finding a way into Britten's music. An outline of planned chapters: - The Top Ten Britten pieces - Critics' First Impressions - Britten's Life - Britten and Pears - The things they said - The Music (stage works, choral works, songs, chamber music, orchestral works) - The Interpreters of Britten's work - Britten as Performer - The Impresario (English Opera Group and Aldeburgh Festival) - Britten's Homes - Trivial Pursuits

Britten's Children

Britten's Children PDF Author: John Bridcut
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571260926
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's life. Interweaving discussion of the music he wrote for and about children with interviews with the boys whom Britten befriended, Bridcut explores the influence of these unique friendships - notably with the late David Hemmings - and how they helped Britten maintain links with his own happy childhood. In a remarkable part of the book Bridcut tells for the first time the full story of Britten's love affair in the 1930s with the 18-year-old German Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen. As Paul Hoggart of The Times commented, 'this type of love belonged to an emotional landscape that has vanished for ever, and we are the poorer for it'. Since making the film, the author has extended his research to include friendships Britten had with children which have not previously been documented. The documentary Britten's Children won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2005 Award for Creative Communication: 'this serious and beautiful film explored one aspect of a composer's life in great depth. Avoiding the temptation of sensationalism, Britten's Children was imaginatively researched and both touching and revelatory'.

Britten's Century

Britten's Century PDF Author: Mark Bostridge
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441151869
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
2013 marks the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. Here is an outstanding collection of essays to mark the event. Britten's Century considers various aspects of Britten's life and work. The book is written by biographers, performers and music critics. Here is a wealth of subject matter - Britten's operatic output, his orchestral works, his contribution to the revival of English song. Biographically, this book moves on beyond the relationship with Peter Pears and the salacious speculation about his infatuation with various boys, to a consideration of Britten's experience as a homosexual man living in a largely homophobic society. Another area here which is often overlooked is the view of Britten from outside the British Isles - the USA and Italy, where his operas have long been extremely popular.

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten PDF Author: Neil Powell
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0805097759
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Book Description
This spellbinding centenary biography by Neil Powell looks at the music, the life, and the legacy of the greatest British composer of the twentieth century Benjamin Britten was born on November 22, 1913, in the East Suffolk town of Lowestoft. Displaying a passion and proficiency for music at an early age, to the delight of his mother, Edith, a talented amateur musician herself, he began composing music when he was only five years old. After studying at the Royal College of Music, Britten went on to write documentary scores for the General Post Office Film Unit, where he met and collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden. Of more lasting importance was Britten's introduction in 1937 to the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become the inspirational center of his emotional and musical life. Their partnership lasted nearly four decades, during a dangerous time when homosexuality was illegal in England. Conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears followed Auden to America before the war began in 1939. While there, they joined the extraordinary Brooklyn ménage of George Davis, Louis MacNeice, and Paul Bowles. Eventually intense homesickness, provoked in part by George Crabbe's poem "Peter Grimes," drove the pair home to East Anglia in 1942 and gave Britten the inspiration for his finest opera. Throughout his career, Britten did not want modern music to be just for "the cultured few" and instead always composed his music to be "listenable-to." The shared quotidian lives of Britten and Pears unfold in this intimate biography and the story of two men who created a truly remarkable legacy.

The New York Times Essential Library: Classical Music

The New York Times Essential Library: Classical Music PDF Author: Allan Kozinn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805070702
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
Kozinn's essays on the most dazzling recordings available provide both practical guidance for building a library and insight into the transcendent power of classical music."--BOOK JACKET.

Benjamin Britten in Context

Benjamin Britten in Context PDF Author: Vicki P Stroeher
Publisher: Composers in Context
ISBN: 1108496695
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 427

Book Description
A thematically organised overview of the musical, social and cultural contexts for the multi-faceted career of this pivotal British composer.

Britten's Unquiet Pasts

Britten's Unquiet Pasts PDF Author: Heather Wiebe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521194679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Heather Wiebe's book looks to the music of Benjamin Britten to elucidate a British postwar vision of cultural renewal.

Beyond Britten

Beyond Britten PDF Author: Peter Wiegold
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843839652
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
With his Aspen award lecture (1964), Benjamin Britten expressed a unique commitment to community and place. This book revisits this seminal lecture, but then uses it as a starting point of reflection, inviting leading composers, producers and writers to consider the role of the composer in the community in Britain in the last fifty years. Colin Matthews, Jonathan Reekie and John Barber reflect on Britten's aspirations as a composer and the impact of his legacy, and Gillian Moore surveys the ideals of composers since the 1960s. Eugene Skeef and Tommy Pearson discuss the influence of the London Sinfonietta, while Katie Tearle reviews the tradition of community opera at Glyndebourne. Nigel Osborne and Judith Webster explore the role of music as therapy, and James Redwood, Amoret Abis, Sean Gregory and Douglas Mitchell look at music in the classroom and creative workshops. John Sloboda, Detta Danford and Natasha Zielazinski discuss collaboration in music-making and ways of facilitating exchanges between the composer and the audience, while Christopher Fox and Howard Skempton examine the role of modernism and the use of 'other', radical techniques to stimulate new dialogues between composer and community. Peter Wiegold and Amoret Abis interview Sir Harrison Birtwistle, John Woolrich and Phillip Cashian, and Wiegold discusses his formative experiences in encountering music-making in other cultures. All of these approaches to the role and identity of the composer throw a different light on how we address 'the composer and the community': the varied, sometimes contradictory, motivations of composers; the role of music in 'enhancing lives'; the concept of 'outreach' and the different ways this is pursued; and, finally, the meaning of 'community'. Underpinning each are genuine questions about the relationship of arts to society. This book will appeal not only to composers, performers and practitioners of contemporary music but to anyone interested in the changes in twentieth-century music practice, music in education, and the role of music and the arts in the wider community and society. PETER WIEGOLD is a composer, conductor and the director of Club In gales and the Institute of Composing. He is a Research Professor of Music at Brunel University, and also director of the 'Brunel Institute for Contemporary Middle-Eastern Music' (BICMEM). GHISLAINE KENYON is an author, freelance arts education consultant and curator.

The New York Times Essential Library: Opera

The New York Times Essential Library: Opera PDF Author: Anthony Tommasini
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805074597
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
An insightful, provocative selection of the best opera performances, chosen by The New York Times's chief classical music critic in one hundred original essays Opera intertwines the drama of the theater with the powerful emotionality of music. In this magical and illuminating guide to the best opera recordings, Anthony Tommasini delves into the ways story and music interweave to create the subtle but telling moments that move us. Tommasini brings to life the rich history of opera performance and the singers and conductors who, over the past century, have come to own the music. He chooses masterworks, such as Arturo Toscanini's La Boheme, captured for posterity fifty years after he conducted the opera's 1896 premiere for Puccini, and Leontyne Price's Leonora in Il Trovatore, an encapsulation of the ideal Verdi soprano. For aficionados and newcomers alike, Tommasini is the perfect guide to the passions and playfulness of the opera.

The Music of Britten and Tippett

The Music of Britten and Tippett PDF Author: Arnold Whittall
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521235235
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
In this classic study of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, Arnold Whittall builds up a unique double portrait of the two leading composers of their generation. For this second, revised edition Whittall includes a new chapter on Tippett's major works of the 1980s: the Piano Sonata No. 4, the large-scale choral composition The Mask of Time and the most recent opera, New Year. In addition, new information on the Britten repertoire and an updated bibliography are also presented.